A Journal of Humor and Verbal Anarchy

 
lonely dental floss

This is the first of a series of features Ithaca Sucks is doing on dentists. We hope to throw light on the murky underbelly of modern dentistry and demonstrate that much of the opprobrium directed at the legal profession is misplaced - not underserved, mind you, simply misplaced.

There are 30 million Americans without health insurance. Does that mean that there are 85 million Americans without dental insurance? Why?

Recently, a team of 30 American doctors flew to the earth quake ravaged city of Bam in southern Iran to assist in the rescue and treatment of survivors. How many were dentists? Why?

George Washington, our first president, had his slaves' teeth implanted in his own mouth. Today, a full mouth restoration including implants costs $80,000.
This shows that you still need to own slaves in order to get your teeth fixed.

History is replete with stories of heroic doctors like David Livingstone, Albert Schweitzer, Jonas Salk, Louis Pasteur, etc. who pulled back the curtain of darkness and lent their names to the fight against disease and human suffering. Name one heroic dentist.

Why can you list the names of famous dentists on two fingers? Doc Holliday, a drunken, trigger happy gunslinger, and William Carlos Williams, a NJ dentist, who wrote the long, now virtually forgotten poem cycle, Patterson.

Why isn't there a Nobel Prize for Dentistry? Why hasn't anyone found a cure for peridontal disease? Is anyone working on one?

Mankind has had teeth for how many thousands of years? You'd think that dentistry would have made some strides in preserving civilization's collective smile. Why, in the western democracies, can 41% of folks over 50 still count on losing all their teeth? Compare that with the polio rate.

Why isn't the person with the world's most famous smile showing her pearly whites? Maybe gummy, full ivoried smiles are an overrated concoction of dental assistants and tooth paste companies? Was Mona Lisa missing teeth?

For 30 years now, ever since Ben Casey showed off his chest hair and Marcus Welby exuded bedside manner, you could count on flipping on the tv most any night of the week and catching the heroic, drama filled antics of doctors, nurses, and now medical examiners. Why hasn't there ever been a tv series focusing on dentists and dental assistants?

Doctors have the Hippocratic oath, the cute little cadesus symbol etc. Do dentists take an oath? Couldn't they muster enough creativity to come up with a catchy logo too? Are they too busy making money? Maybe we could combine the dollar sign with a tooth to give young dentists something to wear on their white smocks?

More later.
Comments invited at: ezrakidder@gmail.com - Peace, Ezra at 6:29 AM